Grafana & Friends DC: AI & Observability

🗒️ Details
Grafana 13 just dropped at GrafanaCON 2026 and we're not wasting any time. Join us at Clare & Don's Beach Shack in Falls Church, VA for a free meetup where we dig into what's actually new, what it means for your stack, and where observability is heading.

If you work in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering in the DMV, this is your people. Whether you've been running Grafana for years or you're just getting started, you'll leave with something useful.

📋 Agenda
🎉 5:30 – 6:00 — Kick-Off & Check-In Grab a plate of food, meet the people around you, and get settled in. We're at Clare & Don's so the vibes are already taken care of!

🎙️ 6:00 – 6:30 — Rob Santos: Grafana 13 & AI in Observability Grafana Assistant is now baked into the platform and it changes a lot. Rob breaks down what's new in Grafana 13, how AI is reshaping the way teams monitor and troubleshoot, and what it actually looks like in practice. No sales pitch, just real talk.

Rob Santos, Senior Solutions Engineer @ Grafana Labs

🎙️ 6:30 – 7:00 — Christopher Field: Building ML-Powered Apps with Grafana Christopher shares how Theia Scientific built a custom application platform that combines Grafana, machine learning, and Jupyter notebooks to power materials research and non-destructive testing workflows. A cool real-world example of Grafana being used way outside the typical use case.
Christopher Field, Co-Founder, President & Principal Investigator @ Theia Scientific

💬 7:00 – 7:45 — Networking & Open Q&A Bring your questions, your war stories, and your opinions. This is where the good conversations happen.

🔚 7:45 – 8:00 — Wrap Up

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Spots are free but limited — grab yours before they're gone.
We look forward to seeing you there!

Parking info — your best bet is the free public parking garage located next to the Whole Foods Market nearby. It's easy to find and the most convenient option.

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📌 P.S. Stick around until the end — we're raffling off two things:
🎁 A Grafana swag bundle
🔧 A $100 gift card to Craftsman Autoshop in Vienna, VA with a goodie basket